PEARL IN

THE SHELL

 

NEIL WILLIAMSON

 

Many of Neil Williamson’s award-nominated short stories are collected in The Ephemera (Elastic Press, 2006 / Infinity Plus Books, 2011). Neil is a member of the notorious school of literary pugilism known as the Glasgow SF Writers Circle, and has the internal bruising to prove it. Neil is also a musician, of sorts.

 

 

THE VICTAZ CREW bombs straight up the back of the bus but Paolo lingers at the top of the stairs, popping his pearls out, casting an ear around the other passengers, on the scope as always for a source of sounds. Over the road rumble and the motor’s electric whine, the coughs and sniffs and murmured conversations, he zones in on the tapping of toes and tuneless sing-a-long; looking out for clues to what’s cycling through their mixes, what might be hidden away in their shells. You can guess a lot from physical appearance, but a good sourcer uses their ears first and foremost. Paolo’s crew haven’t come across a shell they couldn’t crack given enough time, but it helps to be certain it’ll be worth the effort.

Best bet is usually students – wilfully obscure and ever resourceful – or old hipsters who’ve been around since the days of physical media. Anyone who might conceivably be hiding something a bit different in there. New popular music might have flatlined after ICoSP – the International Copyright Simplification Programme – but more people than the corporations would have you believe still value variety in their music.

Paolo is out of luck with this bunch of West End Wendies though. Exactly the sort that happily gobble down whatever the industry tarts up and slops out in the name of entertainment. Fools like that deserve what they get.

Moseying up to join the others, he passes a woman rattling her fingernails on her armrest with all the natural rhythm of a fibrillating pulse. He jostles her shoulder and is rewarded with a slow-focusing glower that chills right down when she checks him. The inked suit, the shirt with the stiletto-tip collar, the chessboard hair and the pearlescent array of shell-tech devices pierced around his face like a beachcomber’s Christmas tree baubles. He grins. She snatches back into her shell and stays there. She’s not the only one to notice the crew now. There are glances; distrustful, wary. Good. The crew expects that reaction, covets it. It’s a proud tradition, rude kids sharing their music with the wider community whether the community likes it or not. Only difference nowadays is they don’t know about it until a little present pops up in their mix with the tag: Mashbombed by Victaz.

Paolo topples into a seat, eases the pearls back into his ears. Nods approvingly. Swanny’s got some beats rolling, ready in case Paolo turns up something of interest. Some mashers go about it full on, nailing a jumble of scraps and slices to a plank of Canto-dub and ending up with the musical equivalent of a horse chewing through a mains cable, but Swanny’s subtler than that. His beats are aggressive but he’s got a real feel for the dynamics of a good groove that spotlights each of those little snippets of song at the same time as binding them together. That’s the secret of good mashing.

When Paolo lenses up a file list of recent finds in the crew’s shell-share, Swanny lifts his head and grins.

“What’s this?” He says it without moving his lips. Only the others can hear it, in the share. Older people look like bad ventriloquists when they do this, but it comes naturally to the crew. Cell phones were on their way out before they were born. They’re the shell generation. Dinks laughs at Paolo when he says things like that. Usually follows it up with some tosh about making the most of every resource in a scarcity economy. Bollocks.

Swanny’s used to Paolo’s little finds but his eyes widen when he runs the first of the files. “Aw, come on, ya perv, that’s no real.”

“Classic 1970s porno. Lifted it off the lollipop man outside St Agnes’s at lunchtime.”

Swanny shakes his head. “Dirty old bastard.”

“Who’s a dirty old bastard?” Dinks drops her prized antique headphones around her neck, paying attention now. Girl’s got a sixth sense for fanny. Even monster fanny like this. “Woah! What was it with the seventies man? They never heard of personal grooming?”

They share a round of lulz. Their toons roll around the share, giggling and clutching their sides.

“Sure, but check the music,” Paolo says.

They both do. They both nod. “Ya perv,” they both say.

This time their lulzing avatars hit Paolo’s over the head with cartoon dildos.

“Aye, aye.” Dinks is their cracker and, next to fanny and retro tech-chic, the one thing she’s got an infallible instinct for is a poorly protected shell. A second or two later, a group of girls appears. Five of them, sixteen or seventeen, school blazers and full make-up, modest shell-tech jewellery: barnacle ear-studs and chickering winkle chain bangles. Absorbed in their shell-share, they don’t even notice the crew and once Dinks gives Paolo the nod he makes quick work of skimming their files.

Strictly speaking at this time on a Wednesday morning, he and Dinks should be at college. There are exams coming up after all, but Paolo will ace them. Hell, he could write the questions.

Explain the effect that the International Copyright Simplification Programme had on the commercial music industry in the United Kingdom and the United States of America.

What that really boils down to is: what’s the magic number? At the last count, the magic number was seventeen hundred and seventy eight. That’s the exact number of individual and distinct songs recognised by the International Rights Authority. ICoSP came about because DRM didn’t work and because the delivery platforms had moved to the automatic micropayment model and because corporate pop music had long been reduced to papping out variation after variation of the same old shit, eventually dispensing with the involvement of writers and performers entirely. So, now there are only so many unique “combinations of melody, presentation and lyrical sense”. Everything else is designated a copy.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise: ignoring the mostly ignored and easily ripped off fringe artists, the history of commercial music was always more about flogging a formula than it ever was about invention and art. ICoSP was merely the acknowledgement of that fact. It only got really silly with the Universal Pact amendment, proposed by the multinationals who, naturally, were terrified. Once the uber-algorithms had worked out which songs were classed as being essentially the same, the amendment determined that the rights would be awarded to the earliest variant still under copyright at the time the statute was adopted as law by the signatory territories.

So now whoever holds the rights for “I Will Always Love You” also gets the cash from a thousand other compositions whose words cover the same general subject matter and have a roughly similar arrangement (and the operative words in that sentence are general and roughly). It came as a shock to the writers of the huge Euro-pop hit, “Build You A Wall”, that the bulk of their millions in royalties were suddenly diverted to the geniuses who came up with “Bob The Builder”. It came as an even bigger shock to discover that the Sex Pistols owned the rights to much of the history of rock and roll. And with the duration limited to fifty years, irrespective of whether the creator was still alive or not, legal battles over the next inheritor of that particular golden chalice had been rumbling on for the best part of a decade.

There you go. Ignoring the looming monster next door represented by the Chinese industry who refused to touch ICoSP with the proverbial barge pole, that’s the history of modern music. Sixty marks, please. If he has enough time at the end of the exam, Paolo might be tempted to add a caustic postscript to the effect that it completely sucks that music students actually spend the bulk of their education learning how not to get fined, sued or imprisoned. Hardly anyone writes new music. Some still try – potentially, if you managed to write a genuinely original song you’d have the rights brokers battering down your door – but if you attempt to release a composition that matches 51% or more of the 93 points of reference in an existing copyrighted song, the rights for your new effort are automatically awarded to the existing copyright holder and you have to pay them for the privilege of playing the song you thought you just wrote. You’d still get a performance royalty but, as the man said: Fuck that.

There is an exception, however. The preview clause. You’re legally allowed to play up to two point seven seconds of any song before your app automatically identifies the rights holder and coughs up. And that’s where mash comes in. Danceable patchworks stitched together by crews like Victaz – as in Frankenstein, yeah? – from slivers you don’t have to pay for. It’s a loophole they’ve been arguing about for years, even though mashes themselves are now also copyrightable. The whole thing is frowned upon of course, but the mash charts are one of the few growth areas in the industry.

The greyest area of the whole thing is that the only completely honest way of creating mash is from what you can preview on the net. There was a time when you could find almost anything online, but after ICoSP the former rights owners of tens of thousands of tracks removed them from sale rather than make someone else a little richer every time they were played.

That’s why, if you’re serious about the art of mashing, about conjuring some sort of originality from a rehash of existing work, you have to go that extra mile to make your source material different from everyone else’s. Which means bending the rules a little to see what the world is hiding from you.

The girls are a surprise. One of them has a decent stash of obscure 50s soul, and another appears to have a fascination for the roaring twenties. Both are untapped areas for the crew so, invisibly, Paolo transfers a selection of files from their share to the crew’s. Swanny drops them a mash bomb as a thank you. From the way he’s smirking Paolo suspects that 1970s pornography will feature prominently.

In the Victaz’s share, Dinks’s avatar stomps a big boot and executes a shrill two fingered whistle. “Our stop, boyos.”

Paolo’s proud of the plan they’re about to put into action. The problem with random public skimming is that the hit rate is low for the effort required, so they’ve been looking around for a higher yield potential scenario than the buses and the malls.

Then someone in the music business had conveniently died.

The crematorium is tucked away up on a hill on the city’s eastern fringe, just green enough and distant enough from the traffic and general noise to give the illusion of peace. Trudging up the access road, all three find the silence unnerving, so Swanny pumps one of his latest mashes nice and loud and they kick into a swagger as they reach the rows of cars parked along the manicured verge.

Paolo pops open Heather Gilchrist’s obituary for some last minute revision. The crew are posing as fans come to pay their respects so, should anyone ask, they have to know at least the names of the old band members, her grown up children, and a few of the songs that had made her famous.

The obit is more a sob story than a celebration. It spends too much time sentimentalising about how the rights crash ruined Heather’s life; making the person secondary to the legal fight, the subsequent poverty and the final retreat into reclusiveness when the cancer was diagnosed. The bit that caught Paolo’s interest though is tucked away at the bottom. A sentence of speculation about how it’s believed that she kept writing, kept trying to make new music, just never released it to the public.

And that’s bollocks. No one keeps their music to themselves. Someone among her nearest and dearest must have copies.

They join the queue of mourners filing towards the door of the crematorium. Dinks is busy with something. Her avatar has changed to her gal-at-work one: swinging pick axe, hard hat and butt cleavage complementing the boots. In the corner of the share is a scrolling shell connection list. By the time they near the door she’s cracked over half of them. Paolo wastes no time.

It’s amazing what goes on in people’s shells. While the mourners shuffle forward, respectful and solemn faced, exchanging murmurs of condolence and regret, they’re watching news feeds, playing games, trolling creationist blogs for lulz. One fella is watching a clip of the deceased naked and grinning shyly, her fingers circling an erection, presumably the viewer’s own. Paolo wonders if this is a remembrance of a sweet, private moment or simply a spectacular display of lack of respect.

Paolo skims over all this activity without much real interest. What he wants to know is whether she shared those new songs with anyone here. He starts with the porn star: finds his music stash and starts shuffling through it. It’s no bad selection, with a fair number of artists Paolo doesn’t recognise. He instructs his shell to transfer the whole lot, and moves on to their next kind donor with relish.

Then, as he’s about to delve into the shell of an older fella – neatly trimmed white beard and one of those old fringed suede country and western jackets that were all the rage a couple of years back – three things happen almost simultaneously. The queue shuffles forward, Dinks mutters, “aw, baws!” and a disconnection icon starts flashing above porno boy’s transfer.

Paolo stares accusingly at the back of his neck but there’s no sign that he’s even aware of the crew’s intrusion as he ducks under the lintel and nods seriously to someone inside.

“Bastard must have disconnected himself,” Swanny says.

“Bit late for a show of respect,” Paolo replies.

He’s fervently hoping that this won’t be a trend when the queue shuffles forward again and then Victaz are the ones under the lintel and their shell-share vanishes. Their faces are still stretched in cartoonish renderings of shock when the usher inside the door asks them: “Family, friends or fans?” The usher is a soft presence but his eyes are granite. They flick to the side and they all see the neatly printed sign on the wall. They all read the words.

“Fans are in the back three rows,” the usher says. Meekly, they follow his indicating arm.

“This is no real. Bastards cannae dae that.” Swanny thinks he’s whispering, but that’s not a skill any of them has ever had much practice at. Heads turn.

“Yes they can.” Dinks is glowering. “They do it all the time during exams, don’t they?” Swanny glowers back. Even at school he never had much reason to enter an exam hall.

As one the crew glare again at the usher, at the sign next to him.

Polite notice.

Out of respect for the deceased, the bereaved have requested that shell connectivity is suppressed in the chapel of rest.

Thank you.

“What are we going to do?” Swanny’s not handling this well.

Paolo puts his hand on his arm, but the wee fella shakes it off. “We’re going to see this through,” he says. “Play our part here as we planned and then blag our way into the after party.”

“Reception lunch,” Dinks chips in.

“Reception lunch, whatever.” Paolo takes an angry breath. “Plenty of time to do it then.” But from the looks they’re getting, the whispers exchanged, he’s not at all sure they’ll get that opportunity. “Let’s just keep it together, eh? See what happens.”

The other two nod, and they all sit down.

The assembly of mourners takes place to the accompaniment of sobs, sniffs and a piped acoustic guitar. It sounds familiar, maybe a diluted version of one of Heather’s old hits. Then the big fella in the fringed coat steps around the coffin to get to the podium and makes a speech. Seems he was her friend and manager for thirty-five years, and now he’s assumed the mantle of being angry and bitter on her behalf. He batters on about her talent, how she could’ve, would’ve, should’ve been a global star if she hadn’t been screwed sidewise by the system.

“And no one cared.” He grips the edges of the lectern, cheeks and neck pink beneath his white beard, and casts an accusation around the room.

“Except for us.” His voice loses its bellow, as if he’s been punctured in the heart. “Her family, her friends, her fans. When she went underground and had to resort to shell hacks to retain control over her own songs, we kept faith. So we broke a few laws, but I know there’s not one soul here who would have not done at least that for her.”

While the assembly murmurs assent, Paolo sighs with frustration at the thought of years’ worth of original music sitting in these people’s shells. He’s not used to what he wants being beyond his reach.

The manager hasn’t finished. “But she never stopped writing right up until the end. And, my friends, the real scunner of this fucking cancer that first took away her voice, then her breath, was that she did it. She wrote a song that beat ICoSP, and we’d almost convinced her to go public with it.” He slumps, diminished. “But then it didn’t matter any more. It doesn’t matter any more. Even if Heather had given her permission there’d be no point in releasing the song now she’s not around to benefit from it. However, as final tribute to a musical genius and a true friend, my friends, I think we ought to do her the honour today of listening to Heather Gilchrist’s final song.”

The big fella steps down and his place at the podium is taken by a skinny girl with a blotchy face. She stares glassily at the audience, turns her gaze to the panelled ceiling. Then, blinking away fresh tears, she starts to sing.

The girl’s voice is soft and throaty, but the hushed space lends it body, a shiver of spiritual echoes. Not that you would recognise this as a song. Everything about it is off. The melody skitters around, continually promising to resolve into a tune but then sliding off again. The rhythm has a folky fluidity but that too strains expectations by dropping or adding beats at random intervals. Neither of these tricks is especially new; classical and jazz composers have been doing stuff like this since forever. It’s a little like mash, but more organic. The girl’s voice grows in confidence until it fills the room and, amid the continuing, soft sounds of grief, other voices pick up the melody and begin humming along.

But the music isn’t what makes the song really special.

“What’s she singing?” Swanny manages an actual whisper this time. “Is it Gaelic?”

Paolo shakes his head. The lyrics do sound familiar, but he can’t actually distinguish them as words. Which is weird because he knows the song is a love song. He knows it, but he doesn’t know how he knows.

“That’s not Gaelic.” Dinks’s whisper is even more awed than Swanny’s. “It’s –”

“Just listen,” Paolo says.

 

 

AFTERWARDS, THEY EMERGE into sunshine. Stand off to one side as the rest of the funeral’s attendees filter past: talking, smiling, their emotional tension discharged. The crew’s shells reconnect almost instantly.

“We ready to roll again, Dinks?” In the share, Swanny’s toon twangs his braces and hops impatiently from one brothel creeper to the other. Dinks’s gal-at-work toon says she’s busy on something. She’s slid her cans up too, which is her signal for really, really, do not fucking disturb me. Paolo looks for the list of cracked shells reappearing. The targets are already climbing into cars and driving away.

“Dinks?”

“Forget them.” Their girlslips her headphones down.

In the share, Swanny’s toon turns bronto and tries to stomp her.

“That wasn’t a real language, was it?” Paolo says.

Dinks shakes her head. She’s pretty when she twists her smile like that, and she only does it when she’s about to say something smart and is trying to find a way of saying it that the other two will understand. “According to the algorithms it’s not a recognised language. But I think it is a real one.”

“How did you manage to run the algorithms?” Bronto-Swanny pulls a face then shrinks back to normal. “Everyone was disconnected in there, man.”

Dinks slides a scuffed digital recorder from the pocket of her blazer. A fan-shaped shell-tech dongle is black-taped into a socket on the top. She’s recorded the song inside, then uploaded it and run the algorithms while they’ve been talking. She always did like her retro gear.

Paolo grins. “You got it all?

She grins back.

“And the language?”

She grins even wider. “It’s actually pretty neat. She invented one of her own. A collection of phonemes that don’t in themselves form actual words, but still manage to convey the sense of the song.” She looks from Swanny to him and back again. “C’mon, you understood it was a love song, right? You just didn’t need lyrics to get it. We’re so conditioned to the conventions of pop music that for the sentiments of most songs we no longer actually need the words, just their shapes. Corporate music hasn’t cared about original lyrics for decades. Gilchrist went a step further and distilled it down to a musical language.”

While she’s been talking Paolo’s done a bit of research and now pops up a Wikipedia citation on Sigur Rós; another on The Cocteau Twins. “It was a beautiful thing, but it’s hardly a unique idea.”

Swanny says. “Still passes the test. It could make someone a lot of money.”

Dinks completes the collective chain of thought. “Whoever released it first would sure as hell cash in. Gilchrist’s family are all about respecting her memory for now, but sooner or later they’ll realise what they’re sitting on.”

“So, anyone with a copy of that music would have to work fast to stake their claim.”

In the sunshine, outside the now empty crematorium, they all nod. In their shell-share, their toons do too.

 

 

ON THE BUS back, there are a few other passengers that under normal circumstances might be worth cracking for a look-see, but the crew have other things on their minds.

“Fuck it.” The crew look up, surprised that Paolo says this out loud. “Gilchrist’s music is cool, but what is it really? A weird shit tune that drones on forever. Might have been her idea of art but it sure as hell isn’t ours. Do we really want Victaz associated with something like that?”

Swanny grins like the bear who ate the baby. An instant later a track starts playing in their share. It’s classic Victaz mash: Swanny’s beats collaged with scraps of nineties R’n’B, sixties Northern Soul, the voice of Bob Wills, the king of Western Swing, calling out howdy-ho! And interspersed between these, threaded through them, snatches of Heather Gilchrist’s last song. The meaning-laden but wordless vocal lilt is the only thing in the mash that repeats and, in doing so, it becomes something pretty old-fashioned: a hook. For mash this is revolutionary.

Swanny looks at the others in turn. “Yeah?”

Paolo and Dinks both say: “Yeah.”

He pushes it global.

By the time they get off the bus the track is getting download traffic and airplay in Edinburgh, Moscow, Rio. By the time they’re home at Paolo’s flat, it’s made it onto nightclub playlists in Adelaide and Bangkok. Swanny prepares half a dozen variations, each of them mining a new facet of Gilchrist’s song for its hook and ready to roll out to up the stakes when the first of the copycats appears.

The mass-shares go mental for it. This is Victaz’s fifteen minutes global. Paolo charts their rocketing notoriety as the crew hops aboard the tube for that evening’s sourcing. Because a mash crew’s like a school of sharks. They have to keep predating or they grow old and cold. Always cracking, always sourcing, always looking for the next new thing.

There will be other songwriters’ funerals – the city once had a lot of musicians, and they’re all getting to that age – but until then who knows what else is waiting to be unearthed, cleaned up and cut into something glittering and abrasive and new.

The world tires of innovations faster than toys at Christmas. Anyone who thinks differently doesn’t know the music industry.